But the intrinsic magnificence, interest, nature, abundance of _Tom Jones_ can only be missed by those who were predestined to miss them.

It is tempting--but the temptation must be resisted--to enliven these pages with an abstract of its astonishing "biograph-panorama." But nothing save itself can do it justice.

"Take and read" is the only wise advice.
No such general agreement has been reached in respect of Fielding's last novel, _Amelia_.

The author's great adversary, Johnson--an adversary whose hostility was due partly to generous and grateful personal relations with Richardson, partly to political disagreement (for Fielding was certainly "a vile Whig"), but most of all perhaps to a sort of horrified recoil from the novelist's easy handling of temptations which were no easy matter to his critic--was nearly if not quite propitiated by it: and the enthusiasm for it of such a "cynic" as Thackeray is well known.

Of the very few persons whom it would not be ridiculous to name with these, Scott--whose competence in criticising his own art is one of the most wonderful though the least generally recognised things about him--inclines, in the interesting Introduction-Dialogue to _The Fortunes of Nigel_, to put it on a level with _Tom Jones_ itself as a perfectly constructed novel.